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Federal officials are scheduled to tour a state prison in rural Michigan on Thursday as a potential site for housing detainees from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm said Wednesday. The prison under consideration is a maximum-security facility in Standish, northwest of Detroit, said Elizabeth Boyd, the spokeswoman for Ms. Granholm. It is among eight facilities the state is preparing to close because of reduced revenues. An administration official said that the visit was intended only to gather information about the facility and that no decisions had been made.

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The national debate over where to relocate the detainees has been heated since the Obama administration announced a deadline to close the detention center in Guantánamo by January. The logistics of the move has been among the more contentious problems, and the notion of relocating detainees in the United States has provoked alarm in some communities and a bipartisan Congressional protest. Although the detainees at the Guantánamo prison, which was opened by the Bush administration as part of its counterterrorism policy, are not presumed to be security threats, no state has thus far been friendly to the idea of housing them. And the House and Senate voted in May to bar the resettlement of detainees in this country and stripped an emergency war-spending bill of $50 million for closing Guantánamo until after the administration submitted a detailed plan.

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What the fucking HELL!?!

I was never for the closing of Guantanamo Bay, because I knew we would either have to release the current prisoners or find another place for them to stay. If you need a place to keep prisoners why not just let them stay in the prison they are currently in?!?! Was Gitmo somehow not nice enough a prison? :261rison is supposed to be uncomfortable. :duh: Nobody wants a prison near them and I'm sure even fewer people want a prison that will hold suspected terrorists near them. :duh: As if Detroit doesn't have enough problems . . . wait until Michael Moore hears about this.

Here's an idea: Since we can't figure out where to put these alleged prisoners of war/terrorists, how about the US Armed Forces stop taking prisoners. That's right, just kill them. That way we don't have to clothe them, feed them, or burden our already overworked justice system.

San Quentinis for sale! How about we put the Gitmo detainees there? :biggrin1:

Had the Bush administration kept Habeas Corpus and due process in mind and pursued a legal path towards fairly convicting the detainees that could be indicted, and freeing the ones for whom there was insufficient evidence (or who weren't captured as combatants on a battlefield), this situation wouldn't exist.

Some of these prisoners could well be terrorists, but we'll never know because of a certain administration's dancing around domestic and international laws... guns a' blazin'.

I've always been for the closing of Gitmo, even just as a symbolic gesture to the rest of the world to show that we've finally got our priorities right. And there are more than one genuinely safe place clamoring for it. So pick one and do it already.

I've always been for the closing of Gitmo, even just as a symbolic gesture to the rest of the world to show that we've finally got our priorities right. And there are more than one genuinely safe place clamoring for it. So pick one and do it already.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay (let's be clear to separate the base from the prison, a la closure) is a funking Holiday Inn, compared to more than 3/4 of the military prisons in non-Western countries 'round the world. The Chinese don't seem too concerned about their facilities for domestic residents, much less foreign.... yet have any of ya'll hypocrites walked into a Walmart or Target in protest... "the world hates us because of Gitmo and Bush".... is that all you have? says more about them, than us.

I was never for the closing of Guantanamo Bay, because I knew we would either have to release the current prisoners or find another place for them to stay. If you need a place to keep prisoners why not just let them stay in the prison they are currently in?!?! Was Gitmo somehow not nice enough a prison? :261rison is supposed to be uncomfortable. :duh: Nobody wants a prison near them and I'm sure even fewer people want a prison that will hold suspected terrorists near them. :duh: As if Detroit doesn't have enough problems . . . wait until Michael Moore hears about this.

Here's an idea: Since we can't figure out where to put these alleged prisoners of war/terrorists, how about the US Armed Forces stop taking prisoners. That's right, just kill them. That way we don't have to clothe them, feed them, or burden our already overworked justice system.

San Quentinis for sale! How about we put the Gitmo detainees there? :biggrin1:

Putting the camp at Guantanamo was a stroke of brilliance. It was the one place on the planet with enough jurisdictional complications to trip up American and foreign busybodies for years. It's still doing it. Somebody really earned his salary with that one.

My own criticism of the program isn't with the detention camp itself, so much as the self-evident fact that most Americans haven't been made to understand its function or its legal basis in international custom and accords, and there's no reason why they should - most of us have no involvement with any of that stuff in our day-to-day lives. These sort of things should be explained in adequate detail, which the Bush admin. never did. It really wouldn't have been a major strain to release something like a White Paper describing the camp, its functions, its administration, and its legal basis.

Lacking such a White Paper, we poor voters have to fill in as best we can. The Guantanamo camp seems to be a combination of (1) a prisoner-of-war camp, (2) an internment camp for enemy nationals who are not legally entitled to the protections (or liabilities - people often forget about those) afforded those who fit the definitions of "legitimate combatants," (3) a prison camp for ordinary criminals, and (4) a prison camp for war criminals (which are not the same thing as run-of-the-mill criminals). All of these uses are entirely legal, and in strict accord with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and earlier custom (the "laws of war" - really customs rather than laws in any real sense.)

So, obviously, people are confused, mainly because they don't know what the definitions are. For instance, "combatants captured on the battlefield" is not what determines that an individual is a prisoner of war. And of course habeas corpus has no applicability to POWs, as was determined (for very good and rather obvious reasons) by the US courts when some Wehrmacht men tried to use a habeas challenge to get themselves out of POW camps during WW2. Similarly, "charges" don't come into it when POWs or internees are involved, as neither is a criminal status.

There are some serious weak points in the system, but unfortunately sober consideration of those has tended to be drowned out in the noise of Guantanamo hysteria.